Last night I watched His Girl Friday on TCM. For about the dozenth time.

Could write so much about this, but what I’m still thinking about a day after is how little is changed in the 94 years since the play it was based on was written. All these little factions uneasily sharing power with each other, the least empowered and represented of which is the little working guy. Scratch that: even less represented are black folks, and completely unmentioned are native americans.

Anyhow, thinking about this a lot listening to tonight’s edition of Jim and Marjery. At least in Boston we have what in 2022 passes for a vibrant local media (not one but two competing NPR news stations, not one but two competing newspapers (plus a still-clinging-to-life alt weekly!)). Listening to their show at its best feels like such great inside baseball on political and media insiders. But it still feels pretty genteel and …empty, compared to the kind of cutthroat competitive newspaper reporting portrayed in His Girl Friday. 8 reporters, all on the crime beat alone, with a dedicated press room in the courthouse, each with their own editorial slant, each trying to scoop the others, partly doing it for the commercial rewards but really mostly doing it for the esteem of their little fraternity (of which Rosalind Russel’s Hildy is in but also above since she’s operating on a completely higher level of talent and ambition).

The reporters within the “media” cohort are all cutthroat competitors, but they’re all in a weird symbiotic/parasitic relationship of access/antagonism with the politicians (the sherrif, the mayor, the governor— who are all in cutthroat competition with each other, despite shifting alliances of convenience). Behind it all is the institution of the armed police, the necessity of which is never questioned.

It’s easy to think that technology has categorically changed all this. It certainly is a different thing to be in the same room face to face with your competitors (while also killing time in the intervals playing cards with each others!) than it is to be up against each other from across cyberspace. But it just doesn’t feel all that different to me tonight.

This idea that the republic lives on these individual actors, competing within their groups, and then groups competing with each other, all acting in self-interest, but all balacing out to keep power in check… is this really the only way to organize a society? What lets us do our best work? What gives us as much space as possible to be happy?